English

I’m putting this here so I don’t have to keep looking it up.

“Association with those you hate is suffering.”

“You must see the people who work with you.”

For my personal archive, here is the talk I gave at Thingscon Amsterdam last year.

Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees.

One for the archives, this a talk I gave last summer that I thought went pretty well.

Modern! How quickly that word had surged forward and multiplied itself like bacteria throughout the world.

Last Tuesday I gave a talk at EMERCE Tech Live on the main stage of the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. It was a lovely event and it was fun being back in Amsterdam however briefly.

“Let us not mix up heaven and earth

I don’t think you can draw a lot of conclusions from this bit of selectorate theory but it’s interesting to get a feel for the numbers.

The USA example of resistance against Trump in the form of Tech Solidarity quickly gained a following in the Netherlands with TechSolidarity.nl and here in Berlin with some Tech-Solidarity-Berlin. I’ve had a small role in both of those groups’ creation but I’m currently not an active participant.

“there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.”

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A grouch through and through, but it was he who first taught me the value of memory, and how to think of it as mental music, a setting to iambs and trochees.

Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV —the far right Dutch Freedom Party— had his campaign start today for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Spijkenisse, one of his traditional strongholds.

Just another day in the Dutch election campaign.

it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now— with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of creation;

The right decision, even when all seems lost, can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The wrong decision, even when a victorious outcome seems all but certain, can result in deadly, catastrophic failure.

“The insistent permissiveness of the late Twentieth Century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late Nineteenth Century.”

Like every year the books I read and the movies I watched. Recommended ones are in bold.

We went over to the client’s office and spent an entire eight-hour day going over each and every pixel and word in that deck. When it was over, the client clapped (really). They loved it. We were relieved. And we never looked at that deck again. Six months after that meeting, nothing had changed on the client’s site. I don’t think they ever looked at that deck again, either.

Kuhn had written about Priestley— that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.

“In fact, bad behavior is more often than not good politics.”

Next up, @alper talking about conversational interfaces. Join the livestream at https://t.co/mdVhV45tsg

Somewhere between language proficiency levels C1 and C2 lies a plateau that I’m finding difficult to cross in German. Living in Berlin I’m simply not exposed to enough of the language on a day to day basis. The usual advice would be to join a Verein and hang out with Germans. That sounds fun but I’m not in the market for a new hobby.

This network is the seat of scientific opinion; it is split into thousands of fragments, held by a multitude of individuals, each of whom endorses the others’ opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods.

Riukhin sat in complete solitude, hunched over his bream, drinking glass after glass, understanding and recognizing that it was no longer possible to set anything right in his life, that it was only possible to forget.

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.

When you shoot a person, you say why and do it, without excuse. This is how the Radchaai are.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

War strategies, however, rest on a deeper foundation of people working together under stress and uncertainty, and good ones shape the terms of the conflict to their liking before combat begins.

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,”Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”

I strolled through the massive exhibition ‘Welt am Draht’ at Leipziger Strasse this weekend. This is a selection of video art from the massive Julia Stoschek Collection exhibited in the former Czech Cultural center.

I’ve spent June until October writing a brief but comprehensive book called “Designing Conversational Interfaces” introducing the creation of messaging applications and chatbots to a non-technical audience.

Today I got a tour of the Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin. I had wanted to visit this museum for a while but this proved the concrete reason to finally go (though the café next door makes some mean pancakes if you find yourself in the area).

I was at the 2016 Bot Summit in London a couple of weeks ago. I did my best to capture salient points from every talk in a tweet. Here are all of them in order.

The video of my talk “Conversations are the New Interfaces” at Interaction16 Helsinki has been posted. I am yet to watch it, but here it is for my archive.

I shared it elsewhere but to briefly clip it here as well. I took a bunch more pictures with the photographer that were a lot of fun but of course this is the one they chose.

I used to travel between the Netherlands and Germany at least once a month and pretty quickly I grew tired of forgetting things. That’s why I made a list (in bold, comments added) with the things that I should take or at least consider taking. Whenever I pack my bag, I quickly scan the list and make sure I’ve covered the bases. Maybe it’ll be helpful to you as well.

Kevin posted yesterday that he had an extra ticket for Max Richter’s Sleep at Kraftwerk Berlin yesterday. Without a moment’s hesitation I packed my sleeping bag and cycled there with him.

I’m still waiting for the pictures of Friday to air on the IxDA Flickr and for the video of my talk to be posted, but here are some notes I found around the web about my talk (for my personal notebook).

I just got back from Interaction in Helsinki having given my talk about how Conversations are the New Interfaces.

I was really anticipating Firewatch and I was sorely disappointed as was of course bound to happen.

At the end of 2015 personal and professional changes made it clear to us that we would not continue Hubbub in its current form. That realization made me reorient myself in Berlin and refocus on my core skills as an engineer.

I have a personal log of culture consumed going back to 2003. This year was a particular low on many counts. I have been busy and I don’t ascribe the same value to consuming culture pure for the goal of consuming it anymore. Been there, done that.

Rob Dubbin at the Awl has written a comprehensive account of what is wrong with Secret Hitler. I agree with his critique but I want to highlight one issue in particular.

I was tremendously hyped for Deutschland ‘83 after hearing about it and watching the first episode. Now that it is finally airing in Germany it turns out that it is not doing that well. Viewership started out low and has been declining over the first four episodes.

I’ve been running a live open streetmap edits view as a screen saver for a couple of years now and it never fails to draw the attention from people in the room (whether they know what OSM is or not). The OSM visualization is pretty cool and really comes to life when it is displayed full screen. It is also a great way to see a part of the world you might not have known existed. I used to browse atlases when I was a kid, so this is me indulging in virtual travel again.

I finally got the chance of trying out the McB, McDonald’s new ecological burger tonight after a visit to the opera.